IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/flgsxx/v46y2020i3p331-350.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Municipality size, political efficacy and political participation: a systematic review

Author

Listed:
  • Joshua McDonnell

Abstract

It is an old adage that local government is a training ground for democracy. Its human scale means that political amateurs can contribute effectively and meaningfully to the politics of a state. But in a political climate seemingly driven to consolidate local government into ever larger units, can a not so local local government still elicit an efficacious and participatory citizenry? This paper explores the effect of municipality population size on two important aspects of democratic culture: political efficacy and political participation. Via a two-part systematic review, the paper examines how extant empirical literature bears on the relationship between size and both of these aspects, hypothesising that political efficacy plays a mediating role between size and participation. The findings are unequivocal: citizens of smaller municipalities feel a greater sense of political efficacy and participate to a greater degree in local politics.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua McDonnell, 2020. "Municipality size, political efficacy and political participation: a systematic review," Local Government Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(3), pages 331-350, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:46:y:2020:i:3:p:331-350
    DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2019.1600510
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2019.1600510
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03003930.2019.1600510?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Malte Möck, 2021. "Patterns of Policy Networks at the Local Level in Germany," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 38(4), pages 454-477, July.
    2. Davit Marikyan & Savvas Papagiannidis, 2024. "Exercising the “Right to Repair”: A Customer’s Perspective," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 193(1), pages 35-61, August.
    3. Young Bae & Byung-Deuk Woo & Sungwon Jung & Eunchae Lee & Jiin Lee & Mingu Lee & Haegyun Park, 2023. "The Relationship Between Government Response Speed and Sentiments of Public Complaints: Empirical Evidence From Big Data on Public Complaints in South Korea," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(2), pages 21582440231, April.
    4. Dagmara Kociuba & Waldemar Kociuba, 2023. "Variants of Boundary Changes—A Case Study of Poland," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-17, June.
    5. Bolgherini Silvia & Mollisi Vincenzo, 2024. "Does Size Really Affect Turnout? Evidence from Italian Municipal Amalgamations," Working papers 091, Department of Economics, Social Studies, Applied Mathematics and Statistics (Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche), University of Torino.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:46:y:2020:i:3:p:331-350. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/flgs .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.